Jenna’s Model Life

Meet my landlord, Miguel.

Miguel’s a forty-something Portuguese interior designer (which explains why my place looks so ‘designed’). Miguel found himself in possession of a career that calls him to Montréal and Milan and Madrid as often as Paris, and a cute Marais apartment that could conceivably be rented as a three-bedroom. Solution: Rent to models. We need furnishings, we love gay neighbourhoods, and we exist in inexhaustible supply.

Miguel, naturally, is far too busy to move all at once. And in any case, moving all at once might attract unwanted attention from his landlord — a certain local department store owns the building — given that Miguel’s lease is pretty unequivocal on the no-subletting issue. So he and his adorable young daughter, Shanna, move bit by bit, and mostly don’t move at all. Which explains how I share a closet with Shanna’s toys, and how I sometimes come home to Miguel sitting on the couch, drinking one of the Red Bulls he keeps in the fridge, and airing a friendly grumble about the dishes in the sink and the bulb that blew in the hall. It’s nice to have a close relationship with the man who cashes your agency’s rent cheques. I have a working understanding of Miguel’s medical history based on the number and kind of prescription medicines he left sitting in the bathroom cabinet alone. And who would guess that people other than my parents steal and secret away every bar of hotel soap they encounter!

By prior arrangement, Miguel had promised to rent two of his rooms to women who work in his office starting November 1. Miguel told one person at my agency about this, who neglected to tell anyone else, and everyone forgot about it until last weekend, when Miguel turned up with the two new room-mates and many boxes of clothing, shoes, and architectural models-in-progress. Model Room-mate and I learned that Dancer Room-mate was intending to move out, and that we had the option of either finding a new place together or separately within the next four days, or sharing a room.

We opted for the latter, and pledged to snap up Dancer Room-mate’s sleeping quarters — the pink, Shanna-signed corner office of the apartment — as soon as she was out the door. Miguel promised to procure a fourth bed for the apartment.

October 31st rolled around, and Miguel was out of town. No bed had yet arrived, and the room-mates and I had to take a stand against one of the office women, who arrived at the apartment expecting to be lodged. Even in the hazy demi-monde of illegal subleasing, some rules are not flexible — and this includes the rule about people who are supposed to move in on November 1 not getting sympathy when they pull a no-room-at-the-inn on October 31. Mope and sigh all you want, woman, I sleep on the couch for no-one.

The next day, everyone played Musical Chairs with the sleeping quarters. No bed came. But then, finally, nor did the woman who’s moving into Model Room-mate’s chambers, the one whom we’d packed off to a friend’s place the evening before.

The other new room-mate manipulated the unfamiliar key in the lock, unpacked her share of the architectural models, chatted with her boyfriend in Italian — and by tonight she was swearing at the washing machine (which has a habit of stopping mid-cycle and disgorging water all over the kitchen floor) with the best of us. She even figured out the apartment’s complex, French, steam-driven central heat controls that had stumped me; I feel we’ve bonded.

Yet still no other new room-mate. Still no bed for Model Room-mate.

Meanwhile I’m sleeping in a hot-pink-painted little girl’s room full of boxed up toys. In a canopied four-poster bed. At least Miguel’s enough of a nice guy to let his daughter trample the studied neutral-paints-and-Aboriginal-art motif that reigns through the rest of the apartment; I’m sleeping in the exact room I would’ve gotten if I’d been thrust into the world of interior design before my tenth birthday. Even if the walls, curtains, etc, are so very pepto-bismol I sometimes wake up sweaty and close to screaming because I had another bloody pregnancy nightmare. (Do all women get those? Do they stop once you’ve given birth in real life? Please tell me they stop.)